Friday, April 15, 2011

A sucker of blood Vs the monger of fear

I still can’t decide whether my vote for the-most-obnoxious-God-made-creature should go to the cockroach or the mosquito. Indeed as creations go, they may actually make me look good in comparison, but that is still no excuse to be so loathsome. One sucks blood for a living while the other distributes free scares and screams.

Look at the cockroach. It seems like God was halfway through making a brown six wheeled limousine when some jerk from earth SOSed him for an adrenalin hike and God immediately minimised the limousine and sent it down to the jerk’s kitchen to make the floor under him a trampoline.

“Well, your adrenalin is up now!” laughed God and when Mrs God got curious he simply replied, “Honey I shrunk the limo I meant to give you for our anniversary,” and Mrs God sensing the sarcasm immediately sent out an addendum that the “limousine” would be anything but exclusive and should remain the cheapest thing made by God (because it was made for the wife) and it would always make every wife pause and contemplate, broom-in-hand, about what kind of life she is leading with her husband. The wife feels maximum hatred when these creatures suddenly fly thereby demolishing all logical and lateral correlations she had previously made between flying and liberation.

When I see a cockroach fly, I feel it is some neglected stooge of Satan with a flying license that lapses every five seconds. Yet, cockroaches, poor creatures are still very kitchen things who take the brunt of your hatred for your husband for putting you in the kitchen in the first place. They even inspired me to attempt a comic strip titled Roach and Encroach involving highly philosophical (hence funny) debates between a cockroach and a pesticide called ‘encroach’.

But the mosquitoes, their very name evocative of sting operations and war aircrafts, invade your bedrooms, prick, draw blood (like marital arguments), make you lunge for things with names such as nets, repellents, coils and N N-diethyl meta-toluamide potions. What are we doing here, warfare or what? But the recent “bat” which is a kind of an “electric chair” for the mosquitoes, which I call Vettayadu Vilayadu (“hunt and play”), after the Tamil film has actually taken insect-killing to the level of pleasurable sport!

If the cockroach transforms you into an encounter specialist-cum-sadist, the mosquito makes you feel like a pincushion-cum-masochist each time it stings. You slap yourself all over your body to catch the elusive winged thief and on that rare occasion when you manage to smash the insect against your flesh, you feel a remorse that is quickly expunged when you justify that the blood shed is your own, after all.

Between the cockroach and the mosquito I vacillate between the oppressor and the oppressed. Both feelings are pejorative. The two creatures are icons of people in real life who bring out the perpetrator and the victim in me. The symbolism is hardly flattering but it largely explains my hatred for these two creatures. What do you make of creatures which make you want to kill them at first sight? And what does it tell of you?

I hate those creatures precisely because they highlight the fact that I have these

reserves of hatred in me, which prompts me to even kill, if provoked sufficiently! And the murderous rage that I build up while I kill a cockroach is terrifying. My heart pounds, my eyes roll, I breathe with my mouth and with broom in hand I am a picture of Kali.

Indeed! Kali is the true pictorial representation of a goddess after a bloody kill and not the sweet smiling goddesses wielding unsullied weapons like ornaments. Try smiling with a golden crown above you and a lotus below after a kill, albeit the slain being a roach or a mosquito!

About Me

Jaya Madhavan is a poet, an award winning children’s novelist, comic strip writer and lately an illustrator too. Her first book for children "Sita and the Forest Bandits" won the first prize in the Children Book Trust’s All India Competition for Writers of Children’s Books (2001). Her second book for young adults "Kabir the weaver poet" is a research backed novel published by Tulika, Chennai. Her short stories and poems for adults have been published in Unisun’s anthologies and in the South Asian Literary journal. Her passion includes traveling, visiting temples of antiquity and singing. The articles you see here are from the weekly column called "Loony Life" she wrote for the The New Indian Express. Jaya's Antidep comic strip (created alongwith her sister Bindhumalini) was published in The New Indian Express's Saturday Zeitgeist feature. Jaya is currently working on her third novel and is a certified Yoga instructor. She resides in Chennai with her musician husband and two children.
She is reachable at jayamadhavan@gmail.com